ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A man so broke that he said he didn’t have the money to visit his son 30 minutes away opened fire Friday at the engineering firm that fired him two years ago, killing one person and wounding five, authorities said.
Jason Rodriguez, a divorced 40-year-old, was in custody Friday evening. He is expected to be charged with first-degree murder today, police said.
He said he attacked his former colleagues “because they left me to rot.” He recently told a bankruptcy judge that he was making less than $30,000 a year at a sandwich shop and owed nearly $90,000.
The shooting on the eighth floor of an office tower paralyzed downtown Orlando for three hours. Police caught Rodriguez at his mother’s home. He surrendered peacefully, and police said he apologized as officers handcuffed him.
All the victims worked at the firm of Reynolds, Smith and Hills, where Rodriguez was an entry-level engineer for 11 months before he was fired for a performance problem in June 2007, the company said.
Witnesses told police they recognized Rodriguez when he entered the company’s eighth-floor lobby. They said he pulled a handgun from a holster under his shirt and shot an employee standing next to the receptionist’s desk, killing him. The slain victim, identified by police as 26-year-old Otis Beckford, was hit by at least two bullets.
The gunman then went into the common work area and fired several shots, witnesses said, wounding five other employees.
The five wounded people were in stable condition at Orlando hospitals, and police say all are expected to survive.
“This is really a mystery to us,” said Ken Jacobson, the firm’s chief financial officer. “There was nothing to indicate any hard feelings.”
He did not know why Rodriguez would say the company had left him “to rot.”
Rodriguez told detectives that the company had fired him without cause and had made him look incompetent.
He told them he was unemployed for a year and a half before getting a job at the sandwich shop, where he worked until recently.
He told them the shop couldn’t give him enough hours, and he later filed for unemployment. He expected to get a check recently but when it didn’t arrive he blamed Reynolds, Smith and Hills, thinking it was harming his efforts to qualify, police said.
His ex-wife’s mother, America Holloway, said Rodriguez and her daughter, Neshby, were married for about 6½ years before divorcing several years ago. They have an 8-year-old son who lives with Neshby.
Holloway said that the couple lived with her in Orlando for several years and that Rodriguez abused her daughter and once threw all her clothes into the street.
